Why Senator Eagleton Fired Me
Rushford, Gregory G.
Why Senator Eagleton FiredMe by Gregory G. Rushford By most standards my short career as a staff investigator for Senator Thomas F. Eagleton would have to be rated a success. During the first...
...And the Senate established a follow-up Intelligence Committee, weaker than might have been hoped for but nevertheless alive...
...Because it has several purposes (smoothing out diplomatic relations, helping the world’s poor, disposing of surplus products, promoting farm exports), and because it is administered by two different agencies (the Agency for International Development and the Agriculture Department), it seemed like a logical candidate for an efficiency study...
...By not pushing McClellan and Whitten, Eagleton staved off a possible loss for himself, and for his constituents, in the Appropriations Committee...
...I said foreign agriculture is an important issue (our farm exports of $23 billion are of increasing diplomatic and economic magnitude) but one that would take several years’ work to probe fully...
...I met him in 1976 in the course of writing an article for this magazine about his successful effort to stop one waste of Defense Department money, the Navy’s Condor missile...
...Whitten, a shrewd and tough operator who has been in Congress since 1941, has been engaged for years in a battle with the Foreign Agriculture Service...
...Three members of the Pike committee who ran for the Senate lost...
...I told him my situation reminded me of John Dean’s, as Dean described it in Blind Ambition, a book both of us had read with total absorption...
...We have to find an answer...
...It breaks your heart to see the way people who have been discriminated against are treated...
...My sources told me a delegation of congressmen had visited the White House early in 1976 to push hard for increased rice exports, and the White House had pushed Agriculture...
...Even then, it was better to hold off for a while, for fear of stirring up resentment on the McClelIan subcommittee...
...Food for Peace” and his feelings were important, while Ribicoff is chairman of the full Governmental Affairs Committee, under which our investigation was taking place...
...This time, he wanted “quick and easy examples of waste to expose, so we don’t get bogged down...
...Members of the Foreign Relations Committee staff assured me that they had no time to investigate the office and would welcome a hand from Eagleton...
...The Office of the General Sales Manager had been created in 1955, over the objections of Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, by Rep...
...But to be effective an investigator has to follow the path wherever it leadsto Democrat or Republican, friend or foe...
...But there was constantly the specter of grave political liabilities if we pushed too hard...
...All this was necessary because Humphrey is known as “Mr...
...For instance, Henry Peterson of the Justice Department’s criminal division got the message during the initial Watergate investigation that he was not to ask the White House tough questions, and he complied...
...In the legislative process the best players are moderates’ people with principles but not rigid ideology who know how to horsetrade, compromise, arid temper disagreements...
...And we can find discreet ways to run the political minefield, or at least try our best...
...officials “knew or should have known that a substantial amount of food would spoil...
...I discovered that the most inefficient part of the Food for Peace b u re aucracy was the innocuoussounding Office of the General Sales Manager...
...My job was to examine waste and inefficiency anywhere in the government...
...The House refused to establish a successor Intelligence Committee when the Pike committee’s jurisdiction lapsed...
...What Eagleton most wanted me to look into, he knew I couldn’t...
...A few weeks later, in mid-June, Eagleton called me into his office and said, “Greg, I think we must sever our relationship...
...We had to pick issues that other senators didn’t already consider their own...
...Unfortunately, that was not the case...
...It’s a tough problem...
...But I can’t touch that one because I’d be called anti-black...
...He was the chief sponsor of the resolution that stopped the Cambodia bombing in 1973...
...I can’t look like I’m on a vendetta against the military,” Eagleton said...
...He just wasn’t comfortable with me...
...government...
...Eagleton and I continued to have a pleasant working relationship over the next few months...
...But Frank Church, who showed he could play along, went on to run a creditable presidential campaign...
...Private commercial arms sales, far smaller than the government’s sales, are licensed by ah obscure State Department munitions control office...
...In a recent report, Whitten complained that the Agriculture Department often leaves the position of general sales manager vacant, and that even when it is fdled, it is “dominated by the Foreign Agriculture Service and its policies concerning sales in world markets.’’ So my investigation of Food for Peace had provided Eagleton with an opportunity to attack not only the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, but also a Congressman who could destroy him in the House-Senate agriculture bill conference...
...It wasn’t anything personal, he said, and he would recommend me to anyone as a good investigator...
...The representatives from Arkansas and Louisiana, both rice-producing states, had lobbied with particular ardor...
...The culprit was apparently the Agriculture Department, which, amid much haggling, had pushed AID to export too much food, especially rice...
...Louis, Eagleton graduated from Amherst College and Harvard Law School...
...You don’t oppose the Chairman on little things,” he told me...
...I’d really like to have you investigate the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission,’’ he told me...
...After these elaborate hedges against senatorial ill-will, Eagleton told me to get to work...
...The Art of Politics The lesson of my story is tbdt the art of politics is not compati,ie with the art of investigation...
...My predecessor had been officially an employee of the District of Columbia Committee (disguising personal staff as committee staff is a common practice in the Senate) and so was I, although early this year the committee was reorganized into a Governmental Efficiency and the District of Columbia Subcommittee of the Governmental Affairs Committee...
...Establishing Our Turf In January a member of Eagleton’s staff got a job in the State Department and recommended me as a replacement...
...It seemed that everything 1 looked into brought on some unacceptable political problem...
...It was a stirring tribute to the lasting power of a few weeks of well-organized lobbying...
...I also helped persuade the Foreign Relations Committee to reconsider the War Powers Resolution, participated in negotiations with the administration on our policies toward Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey, and worked up amendments to the defense bill that will trim military waste...
...The papers have printed stories about widespread illegal international gunrunning...
...Blind Ambition In late May I had a where-are-wegoing talk with Eagleton...
...But I don’t mean to sound selfrighteous...
...I had enough of that when I criticized the D.C...
...A furious last-minute campaign by the gun lobby had nearly defeated him in his first Senate race in 1968, and he was afraid of stirring up the same opposition in the 1980 election...
...A native of St...
...Like Dean, I had the sense that I was working for a boss who had no clear idea of what he wanted me to be doing, and like Dean I felt pressured to create work for myself as a way of making myself indispensable...
...When he learned that Senator Henry Jackson had helped the CIA stave off an investigation of the ITT-Chile affair, Pike was willing to publish the information...
...Arkansas, of course, is the home state of John McClellan, a very special senator to Eagleton...
...For most of American history, the cross-purposes problem has been present, but it hasn’t had major bad effects...
...During the first six months of this year, I probed the Carter administration’s mishandling of the sale of radar planes to Iran, which became the focal point of congressional debate on arms sales...
...Get me a cripple...
...I investigated an $800-million Air Force computer scandal and exposed officials’ lies...
...Rotting on the Docks The first thing I found was that Food for Peace food was rotting on docks and in granaries in Bangladesh...
...At 3 1 he became Missouri’s attorney general and at 39 one of its senators...
...But Eagleton had to say no to the idea because of the political risks...
...Senator Frank Church, who ran the Senate’s intelligence investigation, had access to the same information on Jackson and, as he did on nearly every other sensitive political matter, he covered it up...
...He led the effort to cut off military aid to Turkey after it invaded Cyprus in 1974...
...The federal government was small enough so that making sure it delivered the goods honestly and efficiently wasn’t itself an issue of the utmost importance...
...As Eagleton’s administrative assistant told me shortly afterwards, “I guess you’re too much the investigative type...
...It was the rational thing for him to do...
...Here’s the price of honesty: Pike was damaged politically for what he did...
...In September 1976, a subcommittee that Humphrey chaired reported that in the first nine months of that year, more than half of the $50 million worth of wheat, rice, and soybean oil Food for Peace sent Bangladesh would be “lost to insects, rodents, and mold” in inadequate storage facilities...
...His relations with the White House were (and still are) good...
...The Senator said he would puzzle the dilemma through...
...The Foreign Relations Committee, of course, was already in charge of the larger question of the Defense Department’s $10 billion in arms sales to foreign governments...
...He was 48 years old and in his second term in the Senate...
...Eagleton is good at this, and I saw him accomplish several noteworthy things through its use...
...The general sales manager apparently duplicates the work of other officials, bollixes up the administration of our, food export policies, and acts as a thorn in the side of another Agriculture Department subsidiary, the Foreign Agricultural Service...
...And why was that...
...For instance, military issues were out-they would offend Henry Jackson and Sam Nunn, who had already claimed them...
...Robert Giaimo to go along with Pike’s decision even though Giaimo was chairman of Jackson’s presidential campaign in Connecticut...
...They also make it clear why Congress does so little to investigate government wrongdoing...
...One day last June Senator Eagleton called me into his office and fired me...
...As chairman of the District of Columbia Committee he pushed home rule through the Senate...
...The situation was especially sensitive because just before I was hired, Eagleton had gotten into McClellan’s doghouse by opposing the transfer of a Missouri military facility to Arkansas without the courtesy of advance consultation...
...And now, of course, Eagleton was no longer in an adversary role with respect to the executive branch...
...Missouri grain interests would not have been pleased if in the name of reforming the bureaucracy Tom Eagleton had made Jamie Whitten hostile to them...
...Eagleton offered me a job, and a few weeks later I accepted...
...Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, the chairman of the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee...
...I started an inquiry into inefficiencies in our overseas Food for Peace program...
...We even accomplished a few things...
...The office seemed to be a God-given target for a set of hard-hitting hearings...
...Eagleton himself made courtesy calls to Humphrey and Abraham Ribicoff...
...he kindly offered to let me stay on his staff while I looked for another job...
...In light of Jackson’s national political power, that took great courage for Pike as it took great courage for Rep...
...Pike ran a no-holds-barred investigation...
...By several accounts, that office, understaffed and tucked away in a highrise across the Potomac from the State Department, performs inadequately...
...Whether I went ahead on agricultural exports or not, I told Eagleton, “I want it to be your decision because you are interested in it, and not because it’s something a John Dean has dreamed up...
...He was right...
...When he started to uncover the District’s shoddy bookkeeping some years ago, he said, “it became a morass of work that threatened to tie up my time forever...
...Eagleton wasn’t reluctant to investigate because he’s an evil man-he’s a good senator trying to pass good bills, and he saw investigating as standing in the way of that...
...Most government investigators learn to temper their zeal with political savvy, usually to the detriment of their investigative work...
...I carefully laid the groundwork for my investigation by checking first with Senator Humphrey’s staff to see if they had any objections...
...People elect congressmen t o . perform both the legislative and investigative functions, but in practice those functions work at cross-purposes...
...Indeed, try as I might I could find no problems in Food for Peace that were truly its own fault rather than the fault of Eagleton’s esteemed colleagues in Congress...
...My test of political loyalty came early in my association with Eagleton, and I failed: I didn’t deliver on a request to find illegal campaign contributions to Charles Percy for a friend of Eagleton’s who wants to run against Percy in 1978...
...As he admitted to one audience, “I’m now mainly in the role of apologist” for the new team...
...Investigating the EEOCs of the federal gobernment was primarily the task of the Republicans...
...I got a tip myself that the munitions control office has in recent years downplayed the scope of its dealings in its reports to Congress...
...But if my first set of findings was ill-advised, my second big lead could have earned me the political rube of the year award...
...So my first idea-to look for evidence of corruption in the Pentagon’s $10 billion research and development budget-got nowhere...
...Some horrible wasteful weapon no reasonable person could endorse...
...Arguably, it might be possible to achieve a greater public good by not running completely frank investigations...
...Eagleton taught me another lesson, one he had learned on the D.C...
...He sees the Office of the General Sales Manager as his chief within-thedepartment weapon in that fight...
...The report said U.S...
...The reasons why it was rational go ~~ Gregory Rushford, a former congressional staff aide, is now a Washington writer...
...Easv to Dramatize I first tried to look into the easytodramatize issue of overseas private arms sales...
...A better example comes from my experience a couple of years ago as an investigator for Rep...
...his seniority and influence were growing, especially because a new Democratic President and Congress were just coming into office...
...But in the last 30 years that has changed, and it’s no longer enough to stand by and cluck about the Senate’s reluctance to investigate...
...In January 1977, Thomas Eagleton looked to me like the ideal boss...
...In the Defense subcommittee, when Senator Proxmire urged the opening of unclassified hearings to the public, Eagleton supported McClellan’s successful efforts to keep them closed...
...Its annual budget is $3 million...
...The program, established in 1954, is the vehicle by which we give and sell at generous terms food to other nations...
...In April Eagleton agreed to tackle the Food for Peace program as his new subcommittee’s first investigation...
...He has taken the knife to the Pentagon’s budget...
...Committee...
...And Lawton Chiles chaired a sister subcommittee that was studying military procurement...
...That whole place is in a shambles...
...One of my first instructions had been never to displease McClellan...
...Even more important, John McClellan had just granted Eagleton membership on his Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and it would not be good manners for Eagleton to return the favor by using another subcommittee to investigate the military...
...a long way towards explaining the pressures at work on a young (by Senate standards) legislator who wants to do the right thing and still win the esteem of his peers...
...Eagleton and I first set about establishing our turf, which is a tricky business...
...Otis Pike’s House Intelligence Committee...
Vol. 9 • December 1977 • No. 10
